Tricycle Blog

There's been a lot of back and forth over aid to Burma, but the first U.S. plane has just landed.
A number of other flights arrived over the weekend and some supplies reached Burma by land.
But many foreign experts are still waiting for visas to enter the country and on Sunday, the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) said that the amount of aid getting to victims was "nowhere near the scale required".
The US military says about 11,000 servicemen and four ships are in the region for a military exercise and could be harnessed to help.
The junta insists that foreign aid is acceptable but foreign aid workers are not.
The BBC has an interactive map of the torch's route in China -- You can click on a city to read more about it. The torch is due to be in Lhasa June 20th and 21st.
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Who's the greenest of them all? Our vote gets cast for Tricycle columnist and Zen gardener Wendy Johnson, the subject of a big splashy ol' profile in the New York Times Home and Garden section ("Dharma in the Dirt," May 8, 2008). Wendy's "On Gardening" column has been a prize rose of the Tricycle garden for over ten years, and with the publication of her new book, Gardening at the Dragon's Gate, she's getting a wave of much-deserved attention.
In the Times article, Wendy discusses her lovingly cultivated garden near Green Gulch Farm and the path that led her to appreciate the Buddha-nature of hemlock and lilacs alike. Basically, her life is awesome: meditating with trowel in hand, serving visitors homegrown lemon verbena tea, teaching, composting, writing... We want in!
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While Burma is embroiled in tragedy, the junta presses ahead with its sham constitutional referendum.
Aung San Suu Kyi's house by the University is reported to have no electricity, which is not surprising, and may have lost part of its roof in the cyclone. She has not spoekn publicly since the storm.
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The junta has impounded some aid deliveries, which has slowed relief efforts considerably. This has led some to suggest air-dropping the stuff might be better, but U.K. International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander calls this idea "incendiary."
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For updates on the cyclone and its aftermath in Burma, you can't do better than check in with Buddhist Chaplain Danny Fisher. He's got a whole host of posts full of great information on this. Drop by, you won't leave unenlightened.
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Five days after the storm, Burma's main city of Rangoon is paralyzed and lacks basic services, but the death toll there was small, 400 or so, compared with the Irrawaddy Delta. Food, water, and other necessities are desperately needed on the delta, which was slammed by the incoming storm, and aid teams are stuck waiting in Thailand for permission to cross the border.
Meanwhile, with very little fanfare outside the Chinese media echo-chamber, the torch summits Everest.
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We're a week into the month of daily videos from celebs such as Will Ferrell, Jennifer Aniston, Sarah Silverman, and Eddie Izzard on Burma from the U.S. Campaign for Burma. Go to their website to see them all so far, and to read updates on the disastrous cyclone.
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Should've linked to this earlier but Konchog at Dreaming of Danzan Ravjaa has a great post on feeling sympathy for the young Chinese people who are vigorously defending their country from what they see as unfair attacks from abroad. Some good mythbusting info on the office of the Dalai Lama among other things in there too.
And Danny Fisher linked to a Washington Post article on the Tibetan writer Woeser, who was profiled in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere some months ago. She bravely lives and writes in Beijing, along with her husband, the activist Wang Lixiong.
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The numbers for this terrible tragedy keep rising. Lack of media access means we really don't have a clear idea of what's happening there. All we know is that there is intense misery and suffering, and more to come. It seems clear the government was not prepared and the people were not warned.
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More than 22,000. The junta allows aid to trickle in.
The Karmapa's visit to the U.S. is coming up. His schedule is on this site. At Tricycle we're obligated to mention the controversy over who is the 17th Karmapa, and that there are duelling Karmapas, but this site, which of course has an agenda, says it's a non-issue. It is true that the Karmapa who is coming to the U.S. has a bigger following here, which may explain why he is coming.
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Remember that the 2004 storm killed over almost 200,000 -- not to minimize this one, but to remember how very deadly these storms can be, as we crowd the shorelines and play havoc with the environment.
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I came across a gathering (the Lotus Lantern Parade) in celebration of the Buddha's birthday yesterday in New York's Union Square (quite the Buddhist hotspot lately) and it made me think how scattered holidays are in western Buddhism. Maybe westerners don't want them, having secularized the holidays of their cradle religions. But it seems to play into the worries Clark Strand expressed over the future of the dharma in America. Pardon the crummy cellphone picture.
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Unreleased photographs from Hiroshima. Taken by an unknown Japanese photographer, these images were found on a roll fo film in a cave outside the city by U.S. serviceman Robert L. Capp, who served in the occupation forces.
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The more we hear the worse this terrible tragedy gets. People need clean water, fuel, and food, but the junta, especially with its constitutional referendum coming up, will resist letting foreign aid agencies in.
Witnesses said the government was slow to address the disaster, and exile groups said some residents had told them they were angry about the weak response of the military, which just nine months ago carried out a violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations led by monks.
"This is what people I have contacted complain about," said Aung Zaw, editor of the Thailand-based exile magazine Irrawaddy. "These people were so active in September killing the monks, but where are they now?"
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Aung Zaw of Irrawaddy Magazine said that groups of monks joined residents in clearing the streets, but that in one case they had been prevented from leaving their monastery by armed police.
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